Just an announce from Aopen that adopts Ricoh's "JustLink" in their CDR-W drives:

"...AOpen America today announced a new invention called JustLink technology. This new technology will allow optical drives such as CD-R/RW systems to write at faster speeds with fewer write errors and make the process of storing data on CDs hassle-free for computer users. The first optical drive to incorporate this new technology will be AOpen's popular CRW1232 CD-R/W optical drive, available early this year.

JustLink technology overcomes many of the issues in 12x and higher writing speeds to CDs. Since the user's computer may be interrupted for other tasks, CD writing is often interrupted, and the CD write buffer depletes itself. JustLink technology can prevent under-runs by predicting when they may occur and then taking control of the writing process, intentionally interrupting the write cycle until the buffer refills and writing can resume exactly where it left off, hence the name JustLink.

"Unlike other popular recording technologies used at 12X writing speeds, JustLink technology minimizes the write gap to only 2 microns, as compared to 40 microns in existing technologies," noted Su." That may not seem like much, but the quality of audio CDs is now far superior with our engineers' newest invention."…